The Planets: The Moon

by Dana Gerhardt

I've always been drawn to the Moon. As a beginning astrologer, I
found Moon signs, aspects, and house positions far more compelling
than those for any other planet. The Moon tells the juiciest stories.
Our Moon remembers when we cried out in our diapers, wanting nurture,
the warmth of touch, a breast or bottle of milk. It remembers what
happened next, whether our needs were met and we learned our world
was generous and cheerful or stingy and impatient. Aspects to the
Moon describe our interpretation of mother's mothering, whether
we experienced her as comforting and supportive or smothering and
resentful.

The Moon was also there when we first stamped our feet and tossed
our head in that special way we have. Surprised parents looked
and asked if we thought we were the Queen of Sheba. Well yes, weren't
we the Queen of Sheba? For the Moon's memory stretches even further
back, into other lifetimes, when we picked up certain gestures,
habits
and expectations no one else in our family seems to have. The Moon
represents a deep imprinting, physical and emotional, harboring
mysteries a team of psychologists could not itemize or explain. Its
reactions
are instinctive and spontaneous. Its boundaries are porous, its
core so sensitive, even in our elder years it can receive a cruel
remark
with the unprotected vulnerability of a child. The Moon remembers
everything and wants only our happiness. It's the first to raise
a fuss if our needs aren't getting met.

When I began talking with people about their charts, I naturally
went for the Moon, asking about their childhoods, prying into old
angers and recent wounds, collecting gestures, tones of voice, and
other psychological clues. "Of course," my teacher said
one day, "in a reading you don't immediately start talking about
someone's Moon." The pained expressions of a few first clients
came back to me and made new sense. Oh! The Moon is not an astrologer's
dart board.

As my practice grew, I discovered not all astrologers had learned
this lesson. Amy was nervous about her first session with me. Her
last reading was with a prominent astrologer who'd said that with
Uranus conjunct Amy's Moon, her mother hadn't wanted her, and she
was destined to repeat this rejection until she dealt with her past.
Amy, whose boyfriend had just broken up with her, left that reading
shaken and in tears. Amy's mother may have been stressed and less
than comforting when Amy was born. But over the long stretch of their
relationship, the two were close companions, supporting each other's
independence, and sharing many sweet and quirky Uranian traits.

Most astrology books say that anyone with a Moon-Pluto aspect must
have had a horrific mother. And yet a number of my Moon-Pluto clients
have complained,
"Every astrologer I've seen wants to talk about my terrible mother.
But frankly, my mother wasn't that bad. I love her and I don't feel
traumatized." What I've learned from these and other clients is that
the Moon's expression is complex. Reduce it to a simple psychological
formula at your peril. It is true that over time, a few of these
Moon-Pluto clients would stumble into a tear-provoking memory of
helplessness under their mother's power. And while the memory released
an integral piece of their own psychology, reflecting a buried need
to defend against intimacy, it did not negate the rich and often
supportive connections they experienced with their mom. Sometimes
these lunar breakthroughs went the other way, as with my Scorpio
Moon client who always felt her mother resented her, until she discovered
how tenaciously her mother fought to save her life during an early
childhood illness.

As a novice I thought I knew everything by knowing someone's Moon.
But over time my understanding of this placement has become more
like the Moon herself: It waxes and wanes. Sometimes the Moon is
a potent, luminous presence. Other times, she's a cold glyph staring
back from the chart with no depth or poetry. With some clients, the
Moon can dominate an entire session. With others, or with the same
client at another time, the Moon won't even appear. For years I've
had a reputation as a Moon expert, but periodically I have to keep
asking: What do I really know when I see someone's Moon? What do
I know when I see my own?

The Living Moon

Vedic astrology invites us to think of the planets and luminaries
as sacred living entities--as goddesses and gods. Even though I hang
out with a circle of women who like to call the Moon a "goddess," I
don't come to this language easily. I've never believed the orbs
above hold deities like smiling marshmallow centers. I can believe
in powers greater than myself. And while they may not sit at vast
control boards within the planets, orchestrating all fates below,
perhaps they do speak through the planets. What orbits above
or appears on charts below may be like the holy statues in shrines
at Hindu temples-visible messengers of a living deity. I am most
intrigued by this adjective
"living." It suggests to me that when I'm puzzling about the Moon,
instead of opening an astrology book or consulting the night's Moon
phase, I can also look for the Moon in my very own life, in my body,
emotions, and moods.

I learned volumes about the Moon when I got pregnant. Surely it
was the Moon who overtook my body, filling it out like a ripe fruit,
nurturing the new and fluttering heartbeat inside. I knew nothing
about having a baby! I read books, I watched my diet, but mostly
I stood aside and watched this mystery unfold through some agency
greater than myself. Once my son was born, surely it was the Moon
who taught me the exquisite relief of having someone else to worry
about. Overnight, self-centeredness, the constant burden of pushing
forward
"important" projects and shuttling from one entertainment to the
next, dissolved. From the Moon, I learned the incomparable pleasure
of reflecting another being's light.

But there came a time when I didn't want to be a mother anymore.
I got tired of pleading with Branden to brush his teeth, wipe his
nose with Kleenex, and stop tormenting the dog. I didn't want to
watch "Lamb Chop" in the morning and "Barney" at
night, or play with tow trucks and fire engines on the living room
floor. I cringed at the sound of his sweet three-year-old voice, "Mom,
will you play with me now?" I wanted to be attentive to his
needs, validate his feelings, set boundaries, open possibilities,
do everything the psychology books said I should, but periodically
I ran dry. I lost patience and became the wicked witch.

I can see my struggle depicted in my son's birth chart. He has a
Moon/Jupiter conjunction, opposite Venus, squared by Mars. I have
guilty memories of enacting that Mars square. One morning in particular
I had waged a long battle trying to get Branden to brush his teeth,
wash his face, sit on the potty, so I could get him dressed and packed
for day care. He inched so slowly down the stairs. "Let's go
honey, Mommy's late for work." And then he just stood there,
surveying the day. More nagging from me and a few paces further,
he stopped at the flower bed and asked me (as he often did) if he
could pick flowers for his day care mommy. I said we were too late
today; he stamped his feet and let out a cry shrill as an ambulance
siren, and I lost it. Screaming unkind words, I stalked back, grabbed
a fistful of flowers and threw them at his feet.

I'm often asked by anxious moms what squares or oppositions to their
child's Moon mean. "Don't worry," I want to say, "You'll
find out. Watch what you do when you're hungry, hurried, angry, lonely
or tired."
A Moon/Jupiter/Venus/Mars t-square? There I was, Branden's impatient,
adventurous, indulgent and angry mom, in a scene far worse than any
from my own childhood that I've complained to a therapist about.

Enter my Moon. It's in the 12th house, square Saturn. A guilty Moon.
I'm supposed to take care of others' needs, especially my son's.
Or, in the more psychologically correct version: I'm supposed to
take care of my needs first so that I'm always strong enough to take
care of others' needs, especially my son's. But in the 12th house,
I trance out of touch with my feelings. Like abandoned rabid dogs,
they lunge, snarling and biting at anyone near. This begins my Moon/Saturn
mantra: "I am not good enough, I am not good enough." A
12th house Moon is a caretaking Moon; it is a hungry, victim Moon.
It colludes with my 11th house Cancer South Node and says: Serve
others before you serve yourself, then break down like a child.

Enter Branden's lunar nodes. His 1st house North Node points towards
developing self reliance and independence, while his 7th house South
Node clings, at times draining vital energy from the others he can't
be without. Rebalancing self and other is his soul's mission. He's
got a lifetime to work on it. So of course I knew it was not his
most important project as a toddler. But many times I ventured, "Branden,
can you play with your stuffed bears tonight instead?" "They
are not people," his 7th house South Node would cry.

Round and round I went, until one morning, the image of the Moon,
its reflective light, parceled in phases, from dark to full to dark
again came as a message. The Moon receives and holds the light of
the Sun, as a mother receives and contains the world of the child.
But the Moon goes through phases and so do moms: We can't receive
all the time! What the psychologists omit, or pay thin lip service
to, the Moon remembers, the Moon enacts. When the Moon is fully illuminated,
it demonstrates the height of our reflective powers-our capacity
to listen and intuit another's moods and needs. Nights when the Moon
is dark teach the necessity of pulling back and shutting down. The
inner Moon must likewise make her parched return to the well, shaking
off the light of her life's many Suns. Neglect these cycles, however,
and the inner Moon will take her revenge.

That's how it is with living gods. They fight, they play, they cheat,
they lie, they love, they hate; in short, they live. A key difference
between polytheism, the "many living gods" concept, and
our more familiar western monotheism, which gives us one supreme
Father, is that when there are many gods, the deities get to have
both good and bad qualities. Check out the myths of any indigenous
people and you'll find their gods have and do it all. But when there's
just one God, he's not allowed any darkness or evil. What's bad is
cast out, like that devil Lucifer, fallen from the bosom of our one
Christian God. As above so below: When we don't allow our gods any
fallibility, we likewise won't admit it in ourselves.

This expectation of perfection runs deeps, and it profoundly shapes
our thinking. It gives us internal pictures of perfect Moon mothers, "on" all
the time. With each new child-developmental theory, a mother acquires
new expectations of perfection, now nurturing this, refraining from
that, as though there were nothing else in her life to worry about.
Perhaps this is the real source of mother rage, and why our fairy
tales are filled with so many wicked stepmothers and so few smiling
real ones. Of course I believed that mom was responsible for all
my problems until I became a mother. Now I wonder: Where is the psychological
theory that instructs mothers to listen to their inner Moons? I once
heard Anne Wilson Schaef describe an aboriginal tribe that approached
its mothering in a more polytheistic spirit. Each child had many
mothers; all the women in the tribe shared the nurturing role. That
meant any mother was free, in fact encouraged, to go on a "walkabout" when
the spirits spoke and told her to withdraw and be alone.

We're a solar people. The notion that we can or should be present
all the time is a particularly solar one, for the Sun is always full
and shining. We bring this expectation to work and into all our relationships,
especially our loves. Here too our disavowed Moons may seek revenge.
When I'm in relationship with another, my emotional nature is reflective,
reactive, and changing. Yet it can't be said too often: One cannot
receive all the time. Even if I secretly know this about me, I will
consistently forget it about you. And forgetting this means falling
into the perfect mother archetype. If I'm angry because my partner
isn't meeting my needs, I'm demanding my perfect mother, and my inner
Moon has transformed me into a dependent child. This is one of the
lessons of John Gray's milestone book, Men are from Mars, Women
are from Venus. Intimate relationships are subject to emotional
cycles, Gray teaches. Men retreat emotionally to renew themselves,
women rise and fall in a cycle of emotional highs and lows. Acknowledging
this is how we can receive and nurture ourselves-and steer clear
of the perfect mother trap. The only thing Gray got wrong is that
these cycles aren't rhythms of Venus or Mars. It's what happens when
two Moons are involved.

In a solar return, horary, or event chart, we read the Moon's house
as an area of changeability. But how do we honor this changeability
in a natal chart? What really do I know when I see your Moon? What
do I know when I see my own? I should know that you and I are fluid
and changeable, reflecting, reacting, and withdrawing, cycling from
dark to full to dark again. This is deeply meaningful information,
a profound clue to the swing and dance of life. It's why Lord Siva,
the Hindu god of destruction and creation, honors the Moon by wearing
the lunar crescent on his crown. The Moon teaches that we exist in
relationship-to ourselves as well as others-by gaining consciousness
and losing it, by cycling in and out of light. This is true for men
and women. Everyone has a Moon! But when I was the mother of a toddler,
I searched in vain for the psychological theory that would help me
teach this cycle of intimacy to my son, how to pull away and return,
so he could learn this was natural and desirable, so that twenty
years hence, he wouldn't lose the thread to his own emotions and
shut down, or periodically hate the woman he loves, because he was
first so disappointed in his mom.

When Moon Meets Moon

Astrologers presume that when two people have compatible Moons,
or flowing aspects between one's Moon and another's planets, this
will be a comfortable relationship, with plenty of shared sympathies
and intuitive understanding. The Moon describes what we want from
family life and the way we like to be at home. Venus and Mars hold
the passion in a relationship. But for day-to-day compatibility-whether
we like to hang up our clothes or leave them in scattered piles on
the floor-this is the province of the Moon. When Moons are compatible,
people say things like "I've always felt so at home with Bob" or "The
minute I met Janine, it's like we'd known each other forever."

If only the relationship stayed that way! The longer we're together,
the more time we have to discover each Moon's secret hallways and
trapdoors, so that what once was familiar and attractive can become
irritating and strange. I've had three relationships with men whose
charts had a common lunar signature. One had a Virgo Moon, the others
6th house Moons. I have a Virgo Ascendant; the attraction is understandable.
A man will often seek a woman to embody the traits of his inner Moon.
My men initially loved the way I did Virgo, smart and organized,
health-conscious, analytical, and self-possessed. What a miracle
it was to realize we agreed on everything. We were so alike! But
in each relationship, it wasn't long before I found myself being
accused of bad behavior. They said I was judgmental, picky, and unsupportive,
all shadow Virgo traits. In my twenties, with my first husband, this
was probably a fair complaint. I was only my Ascendant then. During
the ten years of my next relationship, with the help of a mountain
of books and a couple of therapists, I worked earnestly to whittle
this mask away. I learned that men didn't like to be criticized (Oh!).
I developed new tolerance and patience. I dialed up the fun of my
Leo Moon and reveled in the adventurousness of my Sagittarius Sun.
When I entered the next relationship I was thrilled to finally be
a different woman. But four months into our love affair, on one dark
and very long night, I heard those familiar words: "I think
you're judgmental, critical and negating." I was floored.

A friend of mine has a saying: "If ten men say you're drunk,
lay down." Perhaps, despite the prior ten years of inner and
outer work, I was still nothing more than my critical Virgo Ascendant.
But strangely, each time this accusation was hurled, I felt that
my critical, judgmental lover was negating me! So who was doing the
Virgo really? And why did I keep attracting men with this sensitivity?
Was it my own 12th house Moon, opposite the 6th, inviting me to play
a familiar role as victim, reciting its treasured "Why do they
all crucify me" script? When Moon meets Moon, it's like walking
in a house of mirrors!

What really happens when one Moon shines into the dark emotional
waters of another? When I look at you, do I see your Moon or mine?
When one reflection meets another, we get an optical illusion called "projection." What
I see in you may actually be something I don't see in myself. This
ambiguity is threaded into our astrological symbolism. A man's Moon,
for example, is said to describe his emotions, as well as his mother
and his wife. Not being a man, I'm ill-equipped to fully sort this
out, but even a woman's Moon has a dual role, describing both her
feelings and her mother. Most days I feel as unlike my mother as
an orange to a tomato, so how can my Moon be both of us? And why
is my Moon different from my sister's, when the same woman was our
mother?

I have a Leo Moon and I tend to describe my mom in Leo terms. I
see her as an artist, an actress, a narcissist, a child. With my
Moon in the 12th house of spirits, I acknowledge my mother as the
one who taught me about fairies and magic and all things spiritual-as
well as victim scripts and blurred emotional boundaries. My sister
has a Capricorn Moon. She describes my mother in Capricorn terms,
as a dictator and career woman, ambitious, withholding, and cold.
My sister's Moon is in the 3rd house of communication. She considers
my mother overly talkative, full of ideas and promises, but ultimately
unstable. Each of out charts reflects a different aspect of my mother's
chart. My 12th house Moon reflects my mother's Moon sign, Pisces.
My sister's Capricorn Moon reflects my mother's Capricorn Ascendant.

New age philosophers like to say we choose our parents. Maybe there
was a trip to a giant shopping mall in the upper worlds (about which
we might wonder,
"What were we thinking?!"). A more pragmatic explanation
may be point of view. When we look at our parents, we select the
details that corroborate our expectations; the rest we minimize.
So we "choose" our parents through our planetary filters;
in essence, we create them by what we choose to believe about them.
My mother suffered from post-partum depression when my sister was
born, which is consistent with the Capricorn tone of my sister's
Moon. But my mother complains that as a baby, my sister was cold
and distant, never smiled at her, and never seemed to like her since
the day she was born. Each claims only to have reacted to the other's
first move. I, on the other hand, with my more expressive Leo Moon,
was a warmer, more loving child, or so my mother claims. And unlike
my sister, I can remember my mother often being encouraging and creative.
Was her Moon reflected in my waters, or mine in hers?

The Moon is memory, container of our past. But it is also porous,
reactive and changeable. After my last Virgo Moon man, I entered
a relationship with a 10th house Aquarius Moon (opposite my Leo).
What a relief! No longer was I "judgmental" and "picky." After the
gauzy veil of romance wore thin, we were trading insults like "You're
such a narcissist" and "You're always working. You never have time
for me." It took a few years for our respective Moons to throw tantrums
and negotiate the territory, but now each is quite at home with the
other, and not at all the same Moon as was with our prior partners.

If the Moon describes our habitual and changing emotional life, plus
the traits of our mothers and partners, there can be no astrology text
capable of summing it all. That is why, when practicing astrology,
before saying much about someone's Moon, you should wait for the Moon
to rise in the reading of its own accord. In fact, you should make
your deepest study of your own Moon, so you can keep its neediness
and projections out of the way. Then your Moon can do what it does
best: listen, reflect, intuit and nourish the radiant Sun in front
of you.

TWELVE MOONS WORKSHOP

As
earth's closest celestial ally, the moon has a powerful influence on daily
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into an ever more intimate appreciation for the moon's workings in your life

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